The present invention generally relates to apparatus for and methods of searching digital bases and more specifically relates to searching through the utilization of user specified variable search criteria.
Performing complex searches using general purpose processors can prove quite inefficient if multiple instructions are required to operate upon each field of each record. Yet the search tasks may be quite simple in nature and very repetitive in relation to the normal tasks accomplished by general purpose processors. A special purpose processor can be designed which will efficiently search a given large data base. Such special purpose processors are common in the communication industry, for example. Most such processors, however, are not sufficiently flexible to be applied to a wide range of data base search problems.